Many conventional blood cell isolation procedures require preliminary red blood cell depletion and sample volume reduction. These are commonly required processing steps for long-term cell banking and regenerative medicine applications where a maximal yield of rare cells is desired in a reduced volume due to storage limitations and/or the small volume requirements needed for direct transplantation. Today, the most common techniques for processing blood-cell containing samples (e.g. cord blood, bone marrow, peripheral blood) involve density-gradient sedimentation using centrifugation with or without the use of a density-gradient media to improve separations. Automated centrifugal systems have recently been developed for closed-system processing of cord blood and bone marrow samples in order to meet the growing needs for high-throughput sample processing. While greatly improving throughput compared to manual techniques, centrifugation-based devices have limited flexibility and portability due to the weight and fixed physical dimensions of the centrifuge bucket.
Thus there is a need for design simplification that would address issues related to a centrifuge process that will allow high cell recovery.